Monday, February 9, 2015

To help us prepare for Valentine’s Day, philosopher Clancy Martin reveals the secret to true love: learn how to lie.

He should have qualified it by saying something like
sorta-lie, but he is clearly looking for rhetorical force, not accuracy.

Martin is trying to shock people out of their belief that
lovers should always tell each other the truth.

For what it’s worth, I approve of the trope.

It rings true. Many years ago I heard a story [not in my
office] about a woman who caught her live-in love cheating. Since they had been
cohabiting for a dozen years, she felt seriously betrayed.

So she said to her sometime lover: “I can forgive the
cheating but I cannot tolerate lies. I only ask that you have enough respect to
tell me the truth. How many other women have there been during our years
together?”

The man responded: "Twenty-six."

Those who prefer to learn the hard way that you should not
be perfectly open and honest with one’s lovers should keep this in mind.

As abusive as his cheating was, truth-telling was far
more damaging. After all, he was not just cheating, he was keeping count,

You will be thinking that it was good thing that she found
out about his philandering ways. And yet, he might have been more tactful about
it. He might have simply left the relationship without explaining why.

You might also be thinking that if he was cheating that
much, she had to know. If she didn’t have any suspicions, clearly the
relationship was not as close as she imagined.

Of course, some couples seem to have an arrangement wherein
they allow each other a number of extra-marital peccadillos. One is thinking of
a powerful pair of American politicians whose name is a household word.

No one is advising anyone to cheat… of course. But one is
counseling those who do to keep their indiscretions to themselves. As Shakespeare
said: The better part of valor is discretion.

I would note that every serious advice columnist says the
same thing: better, if need be, to lie about a hookup than to destroy a
marriage.

Why is this so?

If a man confesses to a dalliance his wife will immediately
ask herself: why is he telling me this? And there are no good reasons. He might
be trying to hurt her. He might be getting back at her… for Heaven knows what.
He might be warning her that his is more than a simple dalliance, thus that it
threatens her home and her family. Even if he fully intends to stay married,
his telling her will communicate a different message.

If you think that truth-telling is a transcendent virtue,
would you recommend that he describe what happened in explicit detail?

As I said, all good advice columnists will counsel
dishonesty.

Martin has a rather large view of what constitutes lying.
Much of it falls in the category of consideration and tact. Since you might imagine that he is advising you to trick someone into loving you by lying
about who you are and what you want, it is good that he clarifies his idea.

He writes:

Relationships
last only if we don’t always say exactly what we’re thinking. We have to
disguise our feelings, to feint, to smile sometimes when we want to shout.

Later in his column he adds this telling point:

If
honesty is what matters most to you, you might as well embrace a life of
silence and become a Trappist monk.

To some extent this is just normal human behavior. The
notion that we should always be open and honest, always tell the whole truth
and nothing but the truth… comes to us, obviously, from the courtroom and from
psychoanalysis.

When testifying in court you swear to tell the truth, but it
is a very rare occurrence in the life of most human beings.

And yet, the Freudian demand that psychoanalytic patients
say whatever comes to mind, without censoring the least repulsive or trivial
thought, has managed to infiltrate the culture at large. It convinced more than
a few people that being open and honest was therapeutic and that a failure to
tell all was neurotic censorship, a sign of deceit and poor mental health.

Anyone who acquires the art of free association, to the
point of practicing it in everyday life, will surely damage his relationships.

Near the end of his essay Martin offers the following:

When it
comes to love, both honesty and deception should be practiced in moderation.
Only then can we celebrate the intoxicating illusions of love. Odysseus,
Cleopatra, Scheherazade, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Molly Bloom — all of our
greatest lovers have been fabulists, equivocators, promoters ... liars.

The point is well taken… up to a point.

True enough, honesty and deception should only be practiced
in moderation. If you lie all the time, it is just as bad as telling the truth
all the time.

And yet, I find it curious that Martin’s list of our “greatest
lovers” includes so few great lovers. I will grant him Scheherazade, but the
greatness of the cunning Odysseus had very little to do with his prowess at love-making.
True enough, the Trojan horse was a grand deceit, but its purpose was not to
love the Trojans, but to slaughter them.

Cleopatra was a great temptress, but she was also a queen. Her love was politically charged. She
was known for her beauty, but less for her love. Molly Bloom did not count
among the great lovers. Don Juan seduced many women, and thus might count as a
great lover, but he was a great deceiver, someone who abused women.

A teacher of mine once proclaimed that all the great love
stories in Western literature end tragically. He was far closer to the truth
than is Martin.

Think of the truly great loves: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan
and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, Lancelot and Guinevere. None of them ended
well.

You might add Antony and Cleopatra, another love affair that
did not end well.

These great loves failed because the lovers did respect the
proprieties. They did not respect duty or decorum. These lovers were so blinded
by their love that they forgot who they were, what their socially defined
relationships were. Their love was so authentic that it could not long
survive in a world inhabited by social beings.

A man who does not say everything that comes to mind is not
a liar. A man who does not tell his wife that she has put on some weight is not
a liar. Even if he tells her that she looks great, he is not lying. He might be telling her that to him she is beautiful.

A woman who does not tell her husband that he counts among
the world’s most inept lovers is not a liar. She might have decided to use
flattery to encourage him.

A man who does not disclose an extramarital fling is not a
liar. But, when he is asked directly whether he had a fling and he denies it, he is
lying.

Much of what counts as a “lie” here involves considerate, tactful and
respectful behavior. If a man loves a woman he is the custodian of her self-respect. Your compliments and your flattery are designed to let her know
that you see her at her best, and ignore her faults, foibles and
flaws.

Criticizing someone you love, on the grounds that you are
being open and honest is abusive and most often counterproductive.

Being in love does not allow you to forget your
manners, your courtesy, your decorum, especially if you want your relationship
to last more than a few months.

It a delicate question. Maybe you don't want to confess all your transgressions to your spouse, but Catholics value confession to a priest at least?

So a bigger question than confession to a loved one is whether you should know the truth yourself, or whether you can rationalize away things you don't like about yourself, enabling you to keep doing them, well like 26 times for instance.

What does my new favorite psychologist, Jordan Peterson say in relation to honesty:http://wildnessliesinwait.tumblr.com/post/44611942303/dr-jordan-petersons-rules-for-livingDr. Jordan Peterson’s rules for living:1. Tell the truth.2. Do not do things that you hate.3. Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.6. Pay attention.13. Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful. 18. Maintain your connections with people. 25. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.32. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.33. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.-------

#32 is a most interesting metaphor, and I'm assuming its related to suppression.

There's a weird fact in life that you can discover a voice that says "I refuse to deal with anything I don't have to deal with." and you can apparently follow that life plan for YEARS, and when the dishonesty of that assertion arises, you become dishonest, and find an excuse that you can believe that explains why you were not acting in a responsible way.

And seriously, like the 26th affair joke, I do believe in a general philosophy that people do lie, but there are times when you shouldn't like, and being asked a direct question, with a direct request for honesty is one of those times.

I never "forced" my brother to admit his drug use, and didn't trust he'd answer honestly, but I did spy and collect evidence, pipes, gummy coayhangers, etc, so when I asked him to leave my house, I never had to argue with him. I just said it was time for him to leave, and I stuck to it.

So maybe that shows the problem with dishonesty. If you have to spy on someone, you OWE them a direct question and their own conscience to lie or not.

I remember there's a toddler game where a toddler may thing they are hiding because they are covering up their eyes. I don't know if they really believe it, but that's sort of what bad liars looks like from the outside. The facts don't add up, but they have their story, and they're sticking with it.

A very good reason to lie about an affair is if the affair is over and the adulterer wishes to continue the marriage. Confessing to the affair does nothing but relieve the conscience of the adulterer and hurt the innocent party. If you cheat and want to stay married, you need to live with the knowledge that you were a jerk instead of burdening your spouse.